Police Tyranny, Slightly Curbed by James Bovard March 1, 2013 On the night of March 3, 2010, University of Maryland students spilled out onto a main street in College Park, Maryland, to celebrate a victory by the school’s basketball team. Prince George’s County police had been primed for the event and waited nearby, dressed in riot gear and ready for action. John McKenna, a 21-year-old student, skipped up toward a ...
The Democratic Way of Killing: The President as Judge, Jury, and Executioner by Doug Bandow March 1, 2013 One wonders whether Americans felt pride when they discovered that, according to the New York Times, their president was “a student of writings on war by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.” As a result, Barack Oba-ma believes that “he should take moral responsibility” for U.S. policy, including killing anyone and everyone seen as a terrorist threat to the United States. ...
Gun Control Is Violence by Anthony Gregory March 1, 2013 Mohandas Gandhi, the greatest pacifist of the 20th century, is widely quoted as having said, “Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look back upon the Act depriving the whole nation of arms as the blackest.” Some have struggled to reconcile his pacifism with an opposition to disarmament. But there really is nothing to reconcile ...
Foreign Aid: The Seen and the Unseen by Michael Tennant March 1, 2013 Practically everyone in American politics today claims to favor cutting the federal deficit in part by reducing “waste, fraud, and abuse.” At the same time, however, every item in the budget lines someone’s pockets, and that someone can always be counted on to argue — either directly or, more often, through a seemingly disinterested surrogate — that his plainly ...
Book Review: The Crisis Ahead by George Leef March 1, 2013 The Real Crash: America’s Coming Bankruptcy — How to Save Yourself and Your Country by Peter D. Schiff (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2012), 352 pages. As I write this review, the presidential campaign of 2012 has recently (and mercifully!) come to its end. Neither major-party candidate ever addressed the most salient issue facing the nation, namely, the fact ...
Time to Nullify the Drug Laws by Sheldon Richman February 1, 2013 Thomas Jefferson said a revolution every 20 years would be a good thing. Regardless of what one thinks of that, perhaps a little constitutional crisis every now and then would have its benefits. One such crisis may be brewing now. On election day solid majorities of voters in Colorado and Washington voted to make marijuana a legal product not just ...
The Continuing Forfeiture Scourge by James Bovard February 1, 2013 A federal crime wave is sweeping the nation, and prosecutors and G-men could not be happier about it. The Wall Street Journal reported that government “forfeiture programs confiscated homes, cars, boats, and cash in more than 15,000 cases . The total take topped $2.5 billion, more than doubling in five years, Justice Department statistics show.” Beginning in 1970, Congress ...
Taxi Tyranny by Laurence M. Vance February 1, 2013 One of the most prevalent and persistent myths about the American economy is that it is based on the free market, or laissez-faire capitalism. True, when compared with much of the rest of the world, the United States appears to have a relatively free economy. The truth, however, is that in some sectors of the American economy, government intervention ...
Milking the Truancy Cow for Cash by Wendy McElroy February 1, 2013 Diane Tran is a 17-year-old honor student who was jailed for truancy in Texas. When a tearful Tran gave an interview for a local television station, the story went viral. Her parents had recently divorced, leaving Tran to support herself and her siblings by working two jobs in addition to attending school. Fury was unleashed on the truancy court ...
Deflation, Liquidation, and Necessary Revisionism by Tim Kelly February 1, 2013 During his ill-fated 1932 reelection campaign Herbert Hoover delivered a speech in which he said, In the midst of this hurricane the Republican administration kept a cool head, and it rejected every counsel of weakness and cowardice. Some of the reactionary economists urged that we should allow the liquidation to take its course until it had found its own bottom. ...
New Deal Utopianism by George Leef February 1, 2013 Back to the Land: Arthurdale, FDR’s New Deal, and the Costs of Economic Planning by C.J. Maloney (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2011), 292 pages. Drive south from Morgantown, West Virginia, and you soon come to the little town of Arthurdale. At the outskirts of town, there is a roadside plaque informing those who stop to read it that Arthurdale was ...
Clinton’s Legacy, Part 2: The Attacks on 9/11 by Sheldon Richman January 1, 2013 Part 1 | Part 2 Last month I sought to correct the record by showing that the administration of Bill Clinton (1993–2001), which is almost universally viewed with nostalgia, played a major role in inflating the housing bubble, which led to the Great Recession, thanks to aggressive polices pushed by his second secretary of Housing and Urban ...